It is not rare. One of the most popular gems - nokogiri (in the top 10 typically https://rubygems.org/releases/popular https://rubygems.org/releases/popular) ha

It is not rare. One of the most popular gems - nokogiri (in the top 10 typically https://rubygems.org/releases/popular https://rubygems.org/releases/popular) has C extension. Nokogiri was historically a bit difficult to install but that was because of dependencies and not packaging. To overcome that limitation, nokogiri now has prebuilt binaries for most platforms. Packaging in ruby using bundler is amazing. It also evolved naturally. In the beginning there was only `gem install`. Then came `bundler` with package list and lock files. It had widespread adoption and now it is shipped with ruby.